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2015 PEN Literary Award Winners
BOOK AWARDS PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction ($25,000): To an author whose debut work—a first novel or collection of short stories published in 2014—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great… More
Bottoms of the Oceans
Fifteen years later her life was hijacked. All the bottoms of the oceans were marked by her thoughts and the possibility that her little girl was lying there among… More
The PEN Ten with Elif Batuman
"I think literature has a collective purpose, which is to process the reality of lived experience, in much the same way that dreams process the reality of waking life." More
PEN World Voices Festival: A Night of Prayer and Meditation
The desired effect—of evoking a religious service—was, by my accounting, achieved. As I sat, I felt my pulse slow. The setting, and the task at hand—giving ourselves over to… More
The Tubman Sisterhood
Not only was Donya about to become Egypt’s first woman president, she was also openly bisexual and a poet, the perfect antidote to decades of hypermasculine Egyptian politics. More
PEN World Voices Festival: The “Proustian Orgasm” of Memoir and Memory
Michael Ondaatje, Luc Sante, and Tracy K.Smith discussed the memoirs that most influenced their own writing and the prickly task of turning family stories into compelling literature. More
Announcing the 2015 PEN Literary Award Winners
It is with great excitement that PEN announces the winners of the 2015 PEN Literary Awards. After considerable deliberation, this year's judges have made their final decisions for PEN's… More
The PEN World Voices Festival As It Happened: “Divine Punishment”
There were moments on the panel when Ramirez and Caistor spoke like old friends. They talked about meeting for the first time at the Managua Book Festival in 1986.… More
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